In the summer months of 1518 a lone woman exits her home in Strasbourg, France. Under the watchful eye of the local authorities she begins to dance. Within a few days, she is joined by dozens more. Dancing, jigging, krumping in the street, but there’s a problem. None of them can control it, and only death itself can stop them. And after the course of three blazing hot months, as many as 400 people dropped dead in the street. But you can’t actually dance until you die... right? We know about the events of Strasbourg 1518 from a physician named Paracelsus, who wrote an account of the events of that fateful summer. It began with one woman, but quickly spread to hundreds more around town. They started dancing, and couldn’t stop. The leaders of the town were unimpressed with this display. In fact, one of the more prominent members of this class, Sebastian Brant, warned the pious citizenry in his book “Ship of Fools” of the dangers and moral follies of dance. Consider that this is a time in which religion, more specifically a soon to be reformed Catholicism, was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Morality wasn’t something that was separate from religious zeal. He was a killjoy, but he was just saying what everyone else was thinking. The leaders went to local doctors asking them to diagnose the dancers, and they, according to the finest medical diagnostic techniques, determined that the dancers were suffering from “overheated blood” in the brain. So the town leaders decided that the best possible way to fix this issue of… hot blood, was to prescribe, wait for it, more dancing? Wait, seriously? Brew, that doesn’t make sense. Well, we can’t hold people in the past to the standards we have today. The authorities cleared out the center of town for the prescribed dance battle, and shuffled everyone there so that they could… Shake it off… Throw me a bone guys. In the end, local authorities decided that doctors are hacks, and obviously these people were suffering from a little too much Devil Worship in their diets. Which they treated by forced prayer, and in an amazing 180 degree switcheroo, banned absolutely all dancing. They also banned music in the city, and carted the sufferers to a shrine for St. Vitus in a musty grotto nearby, stuffed their bloodied feet in bright red shoes—perhaps to make sure no one could see their gross bloody feet—and were made to march around a wooden statue of the saint. After a few weeks of constant marching and prayer, the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg came to an end, and those who suffered returned to their homes. Presumably to sit down and not dance. John Waller, a journalist for the Guardian, writes that there were two main explanations for this phenomenon with varying degrees of credibility. Claviceps purpurea, or Ergot, was the first theory, but how could a fungus force people to dance in the street until they die? Well, as it turns out, ergot is not only poisonous, but its consumption produces a distinct hallucinogenic effect. In fact, the drug lysergic acid diethylamide, otherwise dubbed by the Beatles as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, is a semi-synthetic form of ergot! There are two main forms of ergotism. Type one, gangrenous, is marked by a buildup of fluids in the limbs, loss of sensation, and if left untreated, loss of the affected tissues. Type two, convulsive, is characterized by paranoia, hallucinations, and muscle spasms. Ergot commonly grows on rye, and the claim is that Strasbourg’s grain supply had likely been contaminated with this hallucinogenic fungus, thereby producing the curious side effect of a sick medieval dance battle to the death. How could eating a little bit of funny fungus make people think you were worshipping the devil? Well, to give one example, many point to ergot as a way to explain the witch hunts in New England. In her paper Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem, Linnda Caporael PhD argues that the growing conditions for rye along the Atlantic were perfect, and it was likely that rich landowner Thomas Putnam’s grain stores had been contaminated, therefore inadvertently infecting the entire town since taxation was paid in provisions, and his contaminated grain was given to the community stockpile. Caporael brings up Mary Sibley, one of the victims in Salem, who, in order to prove that she had been bewitched by a “witch cake”, fed said cake—which was made primarily from rye from the local grain stores—to a dog, which subsequently began convulsing. The point is that ergot hallucinations could result in a diagnosis of “Devil Worship” to be treated by 200 mgs of “some really good prayer”. This could explain the case of the Dancing Plague, however it’s very unlikely that ergot infected individuals would have danced for days on end, let alone until they dropped dead. If you’ve ever seen someone have a motor seizure, you’ll know that it doesn’t look all that much like dancing. “Mass Psychogenic Illness” or MPI, formerly referred to as “Mass Hysteria”. The latter term has generally been phased out of our vernacular because, well, it’s sexist. It comes from the Greek word “Husterikos”, meaning “of the womb”, so from its origin, hysteria was a mental illness that was exclusively diagnosed in women. There are two different kinds of MPI: Anxiety MPI can be identified by “dizziness, headache, fainting and over-breathing”, and is often triggered by odors or other phenomena that can be seen as harmful. Motor MPI is identified by “twitching, shaking, trouble walking, uncontrollable laughing and weeping, communication difficulties and trance states” and is often triggered by long term stress and will fade when the stress has subsided. The theory is that the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg was an incident of Mass Psychogenic Illness triggered by the long term stress of rigid and strict religious orders. People were constantly worried about whether or not something they were doing was sinful, and questioning if it would bring down God’s holy wrath. So when a young woman began uncontrollably dancing in the street, her neighbors, who were already keenly aware of the political and moral undertones of dancing, would ascribe sin to it. Then they’d go home reflecting on all the bad things they had done, and worry night and day if the same fate would befall them. Eventually, at the intersection of their own perceived failings, and the punishment they thought they deserved, their legs would begin to jive. God was making them dance just like that other girl, and that was a fact. What, Brew that doesn’t make sense. How could stress make someone dance until they die? Stress expresses itself in different ways. Sometimes it’s in obvious, clear cut ways, like sweating or muscle tension, and sometimes you get an entire convent of nuns climbing trees and meowing like cats. What. Sorry, let me reiterate. Stress physically manifests through- BREW, OBVIOUSLY WE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE MEOWING NUNS. Convents prior to the 17th century saw multiple incidents where the nuns living onsite would “writhe, convulse, foam at the mouth, make obscene gestures and propositions, climb trees”, and most importantly, meow like cats. Many of the symptoms were consistent with what theologians and exorcists of the time believed were signs of demonic possession. In fact Dr. Robert Bartholomew, in his paper Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness, argues that many of these convents housed young women who were typically coerced by their elders into joining, and much of the rigid discipline included disproportionate punishment including flogging and solitary confinement. Bartholomew claims that these are the perfect conditions for incidents of MPI. Humans are social animals after all. Sometimes this works against us, as we see with the Dancing Plague and the meowing nuns, but by and large, these social imperatives ingrained in us help us navigate a dangerous and complex world. Just like how krumping is a dangerous and complex dance. Now that we’re done filming, do we want to think about what we want to do for dinner? How about some EnCHILLadas! Hah! Nice. Or Char-GRILLed chicken? Or maybe a BREWed coffee? Boo. You stink. Okay well, since apparently you two are the punlords now, you can make dinner for yourselves. Hold up—are you letting us use the kitchen again? I mean, you’ve been good about not setting things on fire lately... Ohmygod. I can’t WAIT to dust off my Gordon Ramsey cookbooks! Or maybe something hot and Fieri… Hmm. I think I’ll come to regret this. Hey, cooking’s just controlled burning and me? I’m the master of roasts. See my next masterpiece On the Hill!
